Northern Racism
De Tocqueville observed that "race prejudice seems stronger in those states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists, and nowhere is it more intolerant than in those states where slavery was never known"

Slavery as History
How can you make an honest inquiry into American slavery without understanding the mindset of slave-owners? How can you do that without being yourself a racist?

Rebel View
Early 19th century American politics and political culture as it was seen by many Southerners

Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was perhaps the greatest writer in American political history. Writers are great, in part, because of their ability to disguise what they really intend.

Lincoln and Race
"You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races."

Thaddeus Stevens
The life and times of Pennsylvania's fiery anti-Southern Congressman

Some writers blame the Democrats, and especially the Southern Democrats, for Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860. The split in the Democratic Party that summer is said to have opened the door for the new Republican Party. Because the divided Democrats could not agree on a candidate, this theory goes, the split in the party allowed Lincoln to capture the White House with a mere 39 percent of the popular vote.

This is provably false. Lincoln would have won even if all the non-Lincoln votes had gone to a single candidate. Yet the "divided Democrats" myth persists. So here's the math.

Lincoln got 180 electoral votes and 1,865,593 popular votes.

Breckenridge got 72 electoral votes and 848,356 popular votes.

Douglas got 12 electoral votes and 1,382,713 popular votes.

Bell got 39 electoral votes and 592,906 popular votes.

Even if you take all the Democratic electors into one pool, they only have 123 electoral votes. Lincoln still wins. But what about the popular vote? As Americans learned again in 2000, elections can hinge on the distribution of votes among the states, and a candidate can win without a majority of the popular vote, so long as he has majorities in key places. So the thing to do is look at the vote by states in 1860. Surely 39 percent of the popular vote couldn't have carried Lincoln into the White House.

Amazingly, it could at that moment in American history. Here is the breakdown of the vote in the 33 states that then comprised the Union. Slightly different numbers are given in different sources, but they do not vary by more than a dozen or so in most cases, and never by enough to change the outcomes:

STATE

ELECTORS

LINCOLN

DOUGLAS

BRECKENRIDGE

BELL

ALABAMA

9

0

13,618

48,669

27,875

ARKANSAS

4

0

5,357

28,732

20,063

CALIFORNIA

4

38,733

37,999

33,969

9,111

CONNECTICUT

6

43,488

15,431

14,372

1,528

DELAWARE

3

3,822

1,066

7,339

3,888

FLORIDA

3

0

223

8,277

4,801

GEORGIA

10

0

11,581

52,176

42,960

ILLINOIS

11

172,171

160,215

2,331

4,914

INDIANA

13

139,033

115,509

12,295

5,306

IOWA

4

70,302

55,639

1,035

1,763

KENTUCKY

12

1,364

25,651

53,143

66,058

LOUISIANA

6

0

7,625

22,681

20,204

MAINE

8

62,811

29,693

6,368

2,046

MARYLAND

8

2,294

5,966

42,482

41,760

MASSACHUSETTS

13

106,684

34,370

6,163

22,331

MICHIGAN

6

88,481

65,057

805

415

MINNESOTA

4

22,069

11,920

748

50

MISSISSIPPI

7

0

3,282

40,768

25,045

MISSOURI

9

17,028

58,801

31,362

58,372

NEW HAMPSHIRE

5

37,519

25,887

2,125

412

NEW JERSEY

7*

58,346

62,869

0

0

NEW YORK

35

362,646

312,510

0

0

N. CAROLINA

10

0

2,737

48,846

45,129

OHIO

23

231,709

187,421

11,406

12,194

OREGON

3

5,329

4,136

5,075

218

PENNSYLVANIA

27

268,030

16,765

178,871

12,776

RHODE ISLAND

4

12,244

7,707

0

0

S. CAROLINA

8**

--

--

--

--

TENNESSEE

12

0

11,281

65,097

69,728

TEXAS

4

0

18

47,454

15,383

VERMONT

5

33,808

8,649

218

1,969

VIRGINIA

15

1,887

16,198

74,325

74,481

WISCONSIN

5

86,110

65,021

887

161

*New Jersey's electoral votes were split, four for Lincoln, three for Douglas.

**South Carolina still did not hold popular votes for presidential electors. The state's electors backed Breckenridge.

It's interesting to compare the electoral votes from today and see the relative importance of certain states, especially the enormous importance of New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The seven deep south states had 47 electoral votes, but were outnumbered by Pennsylvania and Ohio alone. Vermont had more electors than Texas.

To make Lincoln lose this election, obviously, the states that have to shift columns are the ones where he got electoral votes. Assume all the non-Lincoln voters would vote for one candidate. In fact there was such a fusion ticket in New York, Rhode Island, and a few other Northern places. It wasn't enough.

In other states, a fusion was unlikely. In places like Baltimore, the Constitutional Union Party vote for Bell represented local interests, or die-hard Know-Nothingism which likely would have gone for Lincoln if it had no other option. But allow that every non-Lincoln vote in 1860 could have gone to a single candidate, to give the "divided Democrats" argument every advantage. Here's what you get:

STATE

ELECTORS

LINCOLN

non-LINCOLN

CALIFORNIA

4

38,733

81,079

CONNECTICUT

6

43,488

31,331

ILLINOIS

11

172,171

167,460

INDIANA

13

139,033

133,110

IOWA

4

70,302

58,437

MAINE

8

62,811

38,107

MASSACHUSETTS

13

106,684

62,864

MICHIGAN

6

88,481

66,277

MINNESOTA

4

22,069

12,718

NEW HAMPSHIRE

5

37,519

28,424

NEW JERSEY

7

58,346

62,869

NEW YORK

35

362,646

312,510

OHIO

23

231,709

211,021

OREGON

3

5,329

9,429

PENNSYLVANIA

27

268,030

208,412

RHODE ISLAND

4

12,244

7,707

VERMONT

5

33,808

10,836

WISCONSIN

5

86,110

66,069

Only California's 4 electoral votes and Oregon's 3 switch into the Democrat category. Lincoln's margin of victory narrows, especially in states like Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. But he still wins in those places. The "fusion" vote in New Jersey is unchanged. The electors there still split 4-3.

Lincoln has 173 electoral votes; his imaginary opponent has 130.

The Republican party had pored over election returns for six years, and it knew what it had to do to win. It had a regional strategy to win the election by playing the electoral college numbers game. It did so splendidly. The South was cut out of the political equation. The divided Democratic Party was a non-issue.

It's not as though the split Democratic ticket discouraged voters. The voter turnout rate in 1860 was the second-highest on record (81.2 percent, after only 1876, with 81.8 percent).

Choosing Lincoln as the candidate was all part of the strategy -- as was keeping him quiet until after the election so that the carefully constructed Republican platform of 1860, with a plank for each interest group, stood as the real candidate. Seward was the most famous Republican, but Seward, no matter how he tempered his rhetoric, was seen as a radical. And the Republicans -- not just the party bosses, but the rank and file -- had been studying this one hard since 1856, and they knew how many votes they needed to swing in three crucial Northern border states that cared little for abolitionists.

Lincoln's great virtue in 1860 was that he had not been nationally prominent long enough to have powerful enemies or a real reputation. He could be the anti-slavery candidate in Massachusetts, and the tariff protection candidate in Pennsylvania, and the genial rail-splitter in places where neither issue aroused much heat.

He could appeal to the important Know-Nothing element in the patchwork Republican Party, which rejected Seward. Former Know-Nothings supported him. "We cannot elect extreme men," said one of them, Richard M. Corwine. "Moderation in their past life & present views, must mark them or we cannot elect them." Corwine was one of the lower North delegates who blocked Seward early in the convention and opened the door for Lincoln.

Politics are strange. Lincoln and Seward both opposed Nativism, but as historian Tyler Anbinder has shown (in "Nativism and Slavery"), the Republicans needed those Fillmore votes. The old Know-Nothings had a conservative tendency that rejected Seward out of hand. And Lincoln did reward them with patronage, Simon Cameron being a notorious example, though that was a double-dip patronage: it rewarded Pennsylvania as well.